Coming to an interstellar mission near you – Tractor Beams

Get ready for tractor beams pulling enemy alien vessels in deep outer space! Ok, so maybe not in the immediate future anyway. NASA has awarded a $100,000 research grant to the Goddard Space Flight Center team of Laser Experts to study how tractor beams could be used to collect smaller samples in space for analysis. While not the tractor beams that we have come to love and look forward to in Star Trek, these lasers will be used by rovers and deep space probes to capture particles too small or out of the reach of robotic arms. One of the more interesting tractor beam methods is something that the NASA scientists are calling the “tweezer” method in that it uses two lasers going in opposite directions to effectively trap particles and bring them into a waiting probe for analysis. To quote Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies , “is it too much to ask for frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lasers?”